Talk:List of proposed language families

superfamilies and subfamilies

The Indo-European section lists branches within IE that are thought by some to be more closely related to each other than to other branches, while (as far as I can tell) all the other sections concern groupings for which no kinship is generally accepted. That difference ought to be mentioned somewhere. —Tamfang (talk) 23:43, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

So I separated them. —Tamfang (talk) 15:56, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Does Indo-Hittite belong on the list? All other entries are controversial lumps and this one is a controversial split; though it can be seen as a lumping of all IE branches except Anatolian. —Tamfang (talk) 15:56, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Validity for Uralo-Siberian?

Several months ago while looking at a video of its uploader creating a fleshed-out version of Vostyach similar to DJP's fleshing out of the Game of Thrones and Dune languages, I said this: "I heard that Uralo-Siberian is controversial, but I never looked into why. Could it be like Proto-World and Altaic? Is Michael Fortescue(and maybe Diego Marani) anything like G.J. Ramstedt, Nicholas Poppe, Joseph Greenberg, Merritt Ruhlen, Oleg Mudrak, Sergei Starostin, and even Anna Dybo? Is Fortescue a long-ranger fishing for resemblances between words of different languages/protolangs where properly-sharpened minds see differences in complex histories?"

A few weeks ago, someone named Sophia Schlier-Hanson replied: "Some long rangers are fringier than others. Ruhlen and Bengtson do nothing BUT their thing— collecting dictionary words that kind of look similar and arbitrarily making up a word that kind of sounds like all of them, a far MORE primitive and amateurish than the approaches 18th century philologists who first noticed pan-IE cognates were using. Greenberg is a decently well respected Africanist who HAS successfully identified some large, very old families on JUST the right side of max time depth for the comparative method, but in his old age he got cocky and got in with Ruhlen and Bengtson for some reason. Starostin overextended the comparative method a few millennia past its usual limit, did all his work with midcentury through ‘80s reconstructions which are now badly dated, and doesn’t do well at filtering out loanwords, but he WAS the first to attempt comparative method reconstructions of several Siberian indigenous language groups and his work is close enough to methodological respectability to be okay for plausible, consistent diachronic conlanging if not actual academic work building on it. Fortescue, about whom you are asking, is an actual Siberianist who from everything I’ve seen uses perfectly solid methodology, iirc has published a couple etymological dictionaries that were first of their kind, and is one of the foremost experts on some of the languages he’s studied."

I thanked her, and she responded: "You're welcome! I actually quite like Fortescue (and Vajda, the other big name in Pacific Rim historical linguistics, a rather niche special interest of mine). Happy researching/ conlanging! :D"

I would look up the Uralo-Siberian article on Wikipedia, and the preface says it is "considered a fringe theory by linguists" and "utilizes mass comparison", though those pieces of information lack citations. Whoever decided to put those in the article... where did they even get those ideas? As in, where is the evidence to prove it? Which well-ranked linguistics(Campbell, Nichols, Georg, the late Vovin, etc.) are against the hypothesis?

I would ask people on Reddit, and they told me about Georg writing a review a few decades ago for "Language Relations Across the Bearing Strait". https://www.jstor.org/stable/30028571 This information could help out, though it might be outdated. Kaden Bayne Vanciel (talk) 02:39, 7 November 2023 (UTC)